While a great deal of national attention is paid to the
achievement gap plaguing our country's public schools,
equally important—although too often ignored—is the civic
empowerment gap that continues to marginalize minority
students. Public schools are failing students in this regard,
and Harvard Associate Professor of Education Meira Levinson
makes the case for reviving the civic mission of schools in
order to close the empowerment gap in her most recent book,
No Citizen Left Behind. "We have both the obligation and the
capacity to help overcome the civic empowerment gap by what
we do in schools and specifically what we do in schools that
serve defective, segregated, nonwhite, often poor, urban student
populations," Levinson says.

Drawing from her own ethnographic research and teaching
experience in the classroom, her book is an argument for the
role of education in our democracy with implications for K-12
students, educators, and school administrators. While teaching
at an all-Black middle school in Atlanta, Levinson realized that
her students' individual self-improvement would not necessarily
enable them to overcome their historical marginalization. In
order to overcome their civic empowerment gap, students
must learn how to reshape power relationships through public,
political, and civic action. "One crucial piece of an empowering
education has to…be a civic education," Levinson argues. "It
has to be an education that explicitly teaches kids how to work
with others—that they have to work with others, that it is in their
best interest to work with others—to transform opportunities
not only for themselves, but for their neighborhoods, for their
communities, for the world as a whole."

On October 3, 2012, Levinson visited the University of Illinois at
Chicago (UIC) to discuss No Citizen Left Behind with the Chicago
community. You can watch the full interview on IPCE's YouTube
page.